Advancement in genetic variants conferring obesity susceptibility from genome-wide association studies

Abstract

Obesity prevalence has increased in recent years. Lifestyle change fuels obesity, but genetic factors cause more than 50% of average variations in obesity. The advent of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) has hastened the progress of polygenic obesity research. As of this writing, more than 73 obesity susceptibility loci have been identified in ethnic groups through GWAS. The identified loci explain only 2% to 4% of obesity heritability, thereby indicating that a large proportion of loci remain undiscovered. Thus, the next step is to identify and confirm novel loci, which may exhibit smaller effects and lower allele frequencies than established loci. However, achieving these tasks has been difficult for researchers. GWAS help researchers discover the causal loci. Moreover, numerous biological studies have been performed on the polygenic effects on obesity, such as studies on fat mass- and obesity-associated gene (FTO), but the role of these polygenic effects in the mechanism of obesity remains unclear. Thus, obesity-causing variations should be identified, and insights into the biology of polygenic effects on obesity are needed.

Keywords

obesity / genetics / genome-wide association studies / body mass index / fat mass- and obesity-associated gene

References

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the National Natural Science Foundation of China ( No. 81322010) and Shanghai Rising Star Program (12QH1401700) for the grants.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Tao Wang, Weiping Jia, and Cheng Hu declare that they have no conflict of interest. This manuscript is a review article and does not involve a research protocol which would require approval by the relevant institutional review board or ethics committee.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg